Some people in my guild are starting speculate that Blizzard are intentionally making encounters harder on 10 man in order to encourage 25 man raiding again, much like the Thunderforged-concept. Personally, I can't see Blizzard stipulating this as a design goal for their encounters, but if it's infact true, I would be greatly disappointed.

well i dont think they are making encounters intentionally harder in 10 mans to encourage 25mans as that would seriously cripple 10m guilds on low population servers. i personally think that it is slightly overtuned for 10m due to the fact that there are the same amount of adds in 10m as there is in 25 man as blizz have prolly just looked at the health of the adds and reduced it with the proper ratio(60%) and then just said that is close enough, the problem with horridon is that the ration is off considering the amount of dps in a 25m raid and 10 man raid, in fact the health should actually be reduced further and possibly even have 1-2 less adds pr door as that would make them about equal in difficulty in 10m.

Have you consider 2-heal? Things get burn down faster. If you burn adds down fast and interupt correctly in 2nd wave, it's possible to have zero poison stack on raider. If you do, just have the MV Monk uses Revival to clear all at the end of 2nd wave. Where're most of your wipes occurred? Using 25 v 10 argument now is pointless, easier to point finger than figuring what can be done to overcome. I can use the same thing to argue we couldn't kill him in 25 but able in 10, but it's pointless and useless.

It does seem reasonable to assume blizzard have made the 10 man encounter harder in a few ways than the 25 in their (mad) quest to incentivise 25 man raiding.

On the other hand, there is a long history of 10 man raid bosses being easier to manage with certain set ups, so the fact that it's the 2nd boss that requires a MW monk to be doable unless you are dripping in HC T14 gear this time around might just be RNG.

I think the problem will solve itself this week when LFR is released and people can gear up a bit - the larger part of the headache that is this boss on 10 man obviously goes away with a higher ilvl. Give it a month and horridon will be just as much a joke of a fight on 10 as it is in 25.

It does seem reasonable to assume blizzard have made the 10 man encounter harder in a few ways than the 25 in their (mad) quest to incentivise 25 man raiding.

No, quite the opposite. Intentionally making 10m harder would destroy 25m. All of those guilds (minus paragon) you hear about, especially EU ones with sponsors, do 25m for the prestige and accomplishment. Taking that away would destroy the 25m raiding community, even for those of us who do 25m and are not in there for region/world firsts.

Originally Posted by almara2512

well i dont think they are making encounters intentionally harder in 10 mans to encourage 25mans as that would seriously cripple 10m guilds on low population servers. i personally think that it is slightly overtuned for 10m due to the fact that there are the same amount of adds in 10m as there is in 25 man as blizz have prolly just looked at the health of the adds and reduced it with the proper ratio(60%) and then just said that is close enough, the problem with horridon is that the ration is off considering the amount of dps in a 25m raid and 10 man raid, in fact the health should actually be reduced further and possibly even have 1-2 less adds pr door as that would make them about equal in difficulty in 10m.

You guys need to stop getting stuck on this crap. You can have something balanced for 10 and 25 with the same amount of adds. By your logic, Feng isn't balanced because there isn't 2-3 Fengs on 25m. Thats a load of crap. So long as they balance the damage outputs of the mobs and the dps needed to kill them in the same amount of time and the number of dispels (all of which they have done), there is absolutely no reason it can't be balanced with the same number of mobs. All you are talking about is making 10m noticeably easier than 25m which if they want to do, they should just go back to the WotLK model.

Now if you want to talk specifics on tuning mob hp or mob spell damage or something fine, but it is not inherently harder/easier because the number of adds is the same.

No, quite the opposite. Intentionally making 10m harder would destroy 25m. All of those guilds (minus paragon) you hear about, especially EU ones with sponsors, do 25m for the prestige and accomplishment. Taking that away would destroy the 25m raiding community, even for those of us who do 25m and are not in there for region/world firsts.

That kinda ssumes that people raid for prestige and to be ranked.

Which is ofc, utter shite. People raid for fun. No one apart from a few aspergers sufferers with too much time on their hands cares about ranking or any of that stuff.

Which is ofc, utter shite. People raid for fun. No one apart from a few aspergers sufferers with too much time on their hands cares about ranking or any of that stuff.

Not really. Unless you mean it assumes at least some people do which yeah, but I'm pretty sure that is important to people in guilds like Blood Legion or Method. It certainly is important to people in guilds with sponsors or looking for sponsors, or do you think Paragon would have gotten that deal when they changed to Dream Paragon had they been 50th instead of 1st? All of that stuff attracts attention to 25m raiding which 25m raiding absolutely requires if it is going to stay alive. If they intentionally make 10m harder, all of that competitive stuff and attention that 25m has now disappears and its going to slowly die. Now that can't really happen with 10m because 10m is also the more casual option (not saying easier, not saying there isn't at least 1 competitive 10m guild for each competitive 25m out there, just that really casual 25m guilds are far more rare).

Not really. Unless you mean it assumes at least some people do which yeah, but I'm pretty sure that is important to people in guilds like Blood Legion or Method. It certainly is important to people in guilds with sponsors or looking for sponsors, or do you think Paragon would have gotten that deal when they changed to Dream Paragon had they been 50th instead of 1st? All of that stuff attracts attention to 25m raiding which 25m raiding absolutely requires if it is going to stay alive. If they intentionally make 10m harder, all of that competitive stuff and attention that 25m has now disappears and its going to slowly die. Now that can't really happen with 10m because 10m is also the more casual option (not saying easier, not saying there isn't at least 1 competitive 10m guild for each competitive 25m out there, just that really casual 25m guilds are far more rare).

All that stuff is irrelevent to most people playing wow.

Sorry.

People might watch paragon et all do amazing stuff on youtube, but when it comes to sorting their own ridds out, they do whats fun and/or easiest.

We had trouble with 3rd so we swapped the tanks around so I took 3rd with banner. We saved hero for Jallak and I died as Jallak did (Prot warrior). Our druid continued to tank the boss from 65% -> 0% and he ended up on around 17 stacks. We were about 1 minute 10 ahead of the enrage timer.

We are 10 man. 16/16N two weeks before ToT release. We are not very hardcore but we are a coordinated bunch of people. We did it after 1 proper night of attempts. Logs are linked below. It's not a dps check. It's a execution check. We were getting destroyed on Phase 2, but after we got the dispels and interrupts in control. It went very smoothly leading to the kill. We were getting a dps or two dead to sandtrap or whatever they are called. The first time we got close to a kill he hit enrage & that was because of 2 dps dead on p3. I think this fights gets simpler. I was the dk tank, triple puncture do hit like a truck and u need to have well timed a death strike or a cool down to counter it. I was however bringing the adds near the boss when he smashed the gates so the dps can aoe and put some dps on the boss at tht time. We had the boss below 80% when the warlord jumped downed. We also had 2 dks pop army 1 after the another made p3 very very simple with players just staying away from frost orbs. I did calculate our average ilvl to be 495 before the fight. I think once people get the strat down it will be a very very easy fight & yes I am very happy with the way blizzard tuned this fight. It's brutal if you make mistake but again I was very disappointed with the first boss. Yes there's a steep difficulty curve between this and the first boss & from our attempts on council. Thats another fight people will have trouble with. It also requires a lot of coordination. So far 5/5 stars for blizzard. Oh and I forgot to mention before we did prioritized adds and single target them down. AOE won't really work. We did kill Effusion before the Priests on the second gate.

You guys need to stop getting stuck on this crap. You can have something balanced for 10 and 25 with the same amount of adds. By your logic, Feng isn't balanced because there isn't 2-3 Fengs on 25m. Thats a load of crap. So long as they balance the damage outputs of the mobs and the dps needed to kill them in the same amount of time and the number of dispels (all of which they have done), there is absolutely no reason it can't be balanced with the same number of mobs. All you are talking about is making 10m noticeably easier than 25m which if they want to do, they should just go back to the WotLK model.

Now if you want to talk specifics on tuning mob hp or mob spell damage or something fine, but it is not inherently harder/easier because the number of adds is the same.

im not saying it cant be balanced for 10 and 25 man, all im saying is that currently it might be a bit overtuned for 10 man. ofc it can be balanced that is ofc, if blizz have done it correctly, which it seems, you're assuming that they have, which btw is not always the case. and i dont exactly understand your arguement about 2-3 fengs for 25m, as it makes absolutely no sense at all, as it is a boss and what i was talking about was adds, comparing adds to a boss is utter nonense by that account 25m horridon is infinitely easier coz there arent 10-15 adds out at a time. most of what i wrote is assuming that blizz has just taken the ratio difference between 10m and 25m(basically taken the adds' health in 25m and divided it with 2,5) and reduced the adds' health accordingly without taking the dpser pr add ratio into account, ofc im not ruling out that my assumptions are wrong coz they certainly might be, but thats just how it feels to me.

The first attempt that we got Jalak was our kill attempt, our blood DK died right as Jalak was about to die (Jalak then also killed a melee just as I was about to taunt, but then he died anyway). I ended up tanking Horridon until 20+ stacks with smart use of mini/major defensives and heal bombing, didn't really notice the enrage timer approaching any time soon.

Overall I found the fight very fun and challenging, though potentially very comp dependant on 10 man.

We manager to kill it yesterday with group with ilvl between about 485-495. Our tanks were paladin and druid, healers disc, shaman and druid. This is what we found out to be usefull.

- Resto druid puts symbiosis in paladin to get second dispel.
- first three doors, shaman heals Horridon tank
- Try not to move old adds to next door, because they will put some crap on the ground and this will make movement harder on new door.
- First door both add tank healers dispel as much as they can and priest uses mass dispel if / when debuffs start to stack up
- Second door kill priests ASAP, two ranged should be able to take care of effusions. Use stuns, interrupts etc as much as possible. Druid takes care of dispels, he should have two dispels thanks to symbiosis, also people who can drop them, use their own cooldowns (stoneform etc) after effusions and priests are dead.
- Third door, tank kites mobs SLOWLY to fourth door so orbs are behind the group. Hero after second warlords enter. When adds hit tank with mortal strike, disc priest pops spirit shell and heals with that. Dispel duties disc and druid. You dont have to dispel right away, we found out that 5 stacks are something that needs to be dispelled.
- Fourth door. In this we swapped tank healer. Shaman changed to add tank because he is able to dispel curses. Disc healed horridon tank and with horridons dmg debuff smite healing is quite easy.
- For War-God Jalak we used potions to burn the mob down and Jalak tank used cd's. Horridon was healed by disc and with debuff stacking even more penance hits like a truck. After mob was down, Jalak tank waited for his cd's and then taunted Horridon. And then just dps horridon down.

i used banner on gate 2 & 4 tanking the boss on 1 & 3, had the boss facing the wall next to the gate. single target DPS nukage of the first "special mob" that came in. didnt have any poison volley's for gate 2. got a bit messy at 4 with the shaman totems flowing over to end fight right where we wanted to position the two bosses so had a bit of moving about, which didnt really help for the speed of the kill. we got there in the end though, just after the enrage. (if there is one, didnt really notice it but the DBM timer had run out)

you can pre-mark and focus target the mobs on the bleechers, so that helps for assigning interrupts.

It's a challenging fight. It may be overpowered for being the second boss, but it's not overtuned for the reason of normal mode. Our group killed it yesterday after all in all maybe 15-20 wipes. We are around itemlevel 494 give or take a bit. I, myself am 492.
This is the best tip I can give:Army of the Dead is godsent. (Especially on the third door) Getting your interrupts straight is the only other thing to do. It's not an issue if one or two or 3 casts go off. More than that and it can get difficult.

My guild managed to get him down last night on 10 man. We barely cleared 16/16N before the patch, and are pretty lightly geared. Here's some info I can provide for our attempt:

Composition:
493 Blood DK
496 Bear Druid

495 Holy Paladin
490 MW Monk
492 Disc Priest

495 Frost DK
495 WW Monk
496 Shadow Priest
497 BM Hunter
488 Aff Lock

Before the pull, I would mark the 3 Venom Priests with Moon (left), Square (right), and Triangle (middle), as well as the Frost Warlords with Star (left), Circle (middle), and Diamond (right). This made it really easy to call out focus targets during the fight.

Our Bear tank pulled, and brought him to the first door. After the first doubleswipe, we would tank swap (this would give me overall less swaps for the next swap) I would tank Horridon by the door but in the middle, Bear tank picked up the adds. First phase is pretty easy, switch to Dinomancer when he's up, close the door and clean up the adds. Once all the adds are down, make your way to door #2 and perform a tank swap.

At door #2, I assigned our WW Monk to interrupt Moon, our frost DK to interrupt Square, and I handled Triangle/Dinomancer interrupts. We could burn down Triangle before Moon and Square jumped down. right before they jumped down, I would pop Army, and we could clean up.

Once those adds were down we performed another tank swap and headed to door #3. At door three, we focused circle as soon as he dropped, our frost DK popped his army, and we had everyone stack on the bear tank and move towards the last door while cleaning up the adds. We started to fall behind a bit, so we popped hero here to help clean up the adds before door #4 opened.

We performed another tank swap, and picked up the adds as they came out. I would grip the casters as they came out to the pack, and we would focus those down first until the Dinomancer came. Once he was dead and the door was closed, we would focus a warbear then shaman one at a time till everything was gone. This door is probably the easier of the 4 provided people don't stand in totems.

Once the adds were clear, we would perform another tank swap, our bear tank picked up the big guy who jumps down in the middle, burn him down, and get back on Horridon. Once the bear tanks puncture stacks fall of, perform another tank swap, and again for the other tank if needed (we had 2 swaps during the last burn phase). Boss died with 1:15 left on berserk timer.